The Changing Face of the Congressional Black Caucus
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THE CHANGING FACE OF THE CONGRESSIONAL BLACK CAUCUS KAREEM CRAYTON I. INTRODUCTION In March of 2007, Congressman John Lewis faced a problem of a metaphysical variety. Try as he might, he simply could not be present in two places at once. The setting was Selma, Alabama, during the series of ceremonies commemorating the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday.1 About four decades earlier, a much younger John Lewis (then, a spokesman for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) had been assaulted and beaten by a phalanx of Alabama state police while leading a march protesting the state’s denial of the ballot to black citizens.2 That moment in time secured Lewis’s place in American history and politics as a hero of the civil rights movement, and it later made him the easy favorite to win a Congressional seat representing the city of Atlanta, Georgia.3 Among the country’s best-known black political leaders, Congressman Lewis was a prime catch for any politician who was lucky enough to appear with him during the march. Evidence of even a tacit endorsement from him would have been an appealing prize for any of the Democratic presidential hopefuls, all of whom were heavily courting black voters in the South’s primary states. With so much press attention on his whereabouts during the Selma ceremonies, Lewis was quite publicly torn about where to fit in. In an extended radio interview on the topic, Lewis described his deep ambivalence about which candidate would ultimately receive his support.4 Associate Professor of Law & Political Science, University of Southern California. A.B. Harvard College, J.D., Ph.D. (Political Science), Stanford University. A version of this paper was presented at the University of North Carolina Law School. I am exceedingly grateful to Al Brophy and Melissa Saunders for their very helpful input and comments on this draft. 1 See Patrick Healy & Jeff Zeleny, Clinton and Obama Unite in Pleas to Blacks, N.Y. TIMES, Mar. 5, 2007, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/us/politics/05selma.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1. 2 See STEVEN R. LAWSON,RUNNING FOR FREEDOM:CIVIL RIGHTS AND BLACK POLITICS IN AMERICA SINCE 1941 114 (1991); JOHN R. LEWIS,WALKING WITH THE WIND:AMEMOIR OF THE MOVEMENT (Harvest Books 1999) (1998). 3 See MICHAEL BARONE &RICHARD E. COHEN,ALMANAC OF AMERICAN POLITICS 2006 (Nat’l Journal Group 2005); LEWIS, supra note 2. Congressman Lewis has represented Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District since 1987. 4 In a March 2007 interview on NPR, John Lewis described his decision as an extremely tough choice that was quite unexpected. Though vexing, the situation was a happy one for Lewis: [I]f someone had told me back in 1965—42 years ago when we were walking across that bridge in Selma, Alabama—that one day a white woman and a black man would be vying for the African American vote, I would say, you’re crazy, you’re out of your mind, you don’t know what you’re talking about. [Laughter.] It’s a different world, but it says something about the distance we’ve come. It’s a good position to be in. 473 474 Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal [Vol. 19:473 On one hand, marching with the frontrunner, New York Senator Hillary Clinton, made a lot of sense. Her record showed a commitment to the substantive issues that were important to Lewis and many of his constituents.5 Clinton’s major policy initiative while the First Lady was reforming the health care system, a leading issue for the working poor in major American cities. Like his senior colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus (“CBC” or “the Caucus”),6 Congressman Lewis was an ally in promoting health care reform during Bill Clinton’s presidency. The good will toward the Senator’s presidential bid was also connected to the black community’s then-unparalleled support for her husband. No other modern president had enjoyed such popularity among black voters, in large part due to the social and economic improvements directed to the districts of CBC members.7 However, there were also some compelling reasons for Lewis to have stood with Clinton’s principal rival—Illinois Senator Barack Obama. In some ways, Obama embodied the same brand of civic activism that first drew Lewis to the civil rights movement.8 Obama’s unexpectedly strong campaign offered perhaps the best chance for a black candidate to win the nation’s highest office. Quite different from Jesse Jackson’s Democratic primary campaigns in the 1980s, Obama enjoyed at least as much support outside the black electorate as within it.9 Obama’s theme of bridging traditional divides of race, partisanship and class appealed to Lewis along with many of the newer CBC members who had already lined up behind NPR News Morning Edition: Congressman John Lewis (NPR radio broadcast Mar. 30, 2000) (transcript available at http://www.npr.org/about/press/2007/033007.lewis.html). 5 While her husband was governor of Arkansas, for instance, Clinton had worked throughout the South advocating for increased public funding for child education and welfare. 6The members who have declared their support for Senator Clinton are Corinne Brown, Donna Christensen, Yvette Clark, Emanuel Cleaver, Alcee Hastings, Sheila Jackson-Lee, John Lewis, Kendrick Meek, Gregory Meeks, Charlie Rangel, Laura Richardson, Edolphus Towns, Stephanie Tubbs-Jones, and Diane Watson. 7 Even in the doldrums of the Clinton administration, the President maintained an exceedingly high level of support among African-American voters. While a great deal of this support can be explained by his support of substantive policies favored by African Americans, there are those who would ascribe the connection to common cultural roots. See Toni Morrison, Clinton as the First Black President, NEW YORKER, Oct. 1998, available at http://ontology.buffalo.edu./smith/clinton/morrison.html. In the aforementioned NPR interview, Lewis offered his own analysis of the special affection former President Clinton enjoyed within the black community: Bill Clinton is one of the few presidents that can stand up and sing every verse of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’ I can remember a few short years ago, candidate Bill Clinton came to Capitol Hill, two young black men said to me, Congressman Bill Clinton act more like a brother than a lot of brothers. NPR News Morning Edition, supra note 4. 8 Before entering politics, Obama was a community organizer in an underserved, largely black community in Chicago’s South Side. Indeed, Lewis compared Obama’s appeal to a large audience of American voters to another political icon: “Obama may be the first candidate for president since Robert Kennedy to energize such an unbelievable make-up of the American quilt.” NPR News Morning Edition, supra note 4. 9 See Kareem Crayton, You May Not Get There With Me: Barack Obama and the Black Political Establishment, in BARACK OBAMA AND AFRICAN AMERICAN EMPOWERMENT:THE RISE OF BLACK AMERICA’S NEW LEADERSHIP (Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke eds., Palgrave Press 2009); KATHERINE TATE,FROM PROTEST TO POLITICS:THE NEW BLACK VOTERS IN AMERICAN ELECTIONS 8– 9 (Harvard Univ. Press 1994) (discussing Jackson’s failure to gain the Democratic party nomination despite massive black support); Valeria Sinclair-Chapman & Melanye Price, Black Politics, the 2008 Election, and the (Im)Possibility of Race Transcendence, 41 PS: POL.SCI.&POL. 739, 740 (2009) (noting that Obama’s campaign was not as reliant upon black support as Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition). 2010] The Changing Face of the Congressional Black Caucus 475 his candidacy.10 Although a senior member of the CBC, Lewis had inclinations more aligned with the younger caucus members.11 The Clinton-Obama divide within the Caucus is just one very public illustration of an increasingly common reality for one of the oldest and most significant identity interest groups within the U.S. House of Representatives. On a variety of key substantive policy matters, Congressman Lewis and his CBC colleagues now find themselves agreeing less often than in earlier times. This article explores some of the reasons why this is so. Part of the explanation has to do with the changing mode of politics that is represented within the Caucus. While its members have almost uniformly understood the Caucus’s role as a close network dedicated to representing black political interests, the CBC has more recently become a looser confederation of members who hold divergent and sometimes conflicting political and economic viewpoints. I argue that the more traditional “identity based” politics that once dominated the membership now competes with a newer brand of politics in which members identify and develop strategic alliances between segments of the black community and other parts of the general electorate. This more recent style of politics has emerged with the arrival of newer members of the Caucus who bring distinct experiences to their jobs. At the same time, this change reflects the expanded set of opportunities that are available for newer Caucus members to advance their careers. Whereas many of the original CBC members fully committed themselves to providing services to their House districts for their entire careers, the newer members of the Caucus have aspirations that often go beyond maintaining a rank-and-file seat within the House of Representatives. Today, the newer members of the Caucus may realistically seek leadership positions in the House and may run for higher offices with statewide or national constituencies. To appeal to these larger (and often more conservative) constituencies, new members of the Caucus sometimes work with different incentives than their predecessors. These internal transformations within the Caucus are most evident in the votes that members cast on the floor of the House of Representatives.